Word: melodrama
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...diaries were genuine, publication in Stern should have been forbidden in consideration of the victims of Nazi power." In the U.S., historians and social scientists labeled the diaries legitimate news, if authentic, but condemned some coverage as sensational. Concluded Yale University Psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton: "In the melodrama unfolding before us, responsibility to history or to profound moral questions was lost in the intensity of commercial competition...
...sorts of angles and in all sorts of lights. She matures quite convincingly during the movie, losing some of her knock-kneed innocence for Sarah Lawrence chic. But there are too many holes, too many inconsistencies to raise Baby It's You from the level of high school melodrama. How is it that Sheik steals cars and never gets caught? Why does Jill dress so nicely, but live in a very plain middle class house on a very plain street? How does she manage to fit all those nice outfits into two--count them!--suitcases when she goes to college...
...among the "loveliest" and "most charming" of Shakespeare's heroines, while dismissing Bertram and Parolles as unworthy of the ladies' or our interest. By Act V, Helena's passion for her unrequiting snob has become an act of beatific willfulness and the stuff of gaslight melodrama...
...invocation of Mount Ararat is meant to raise the eyes heavenward, Thomas' repeated mention of Russia's greatest poets from Pushkin to Pasternak is obviously intended to heighten the moral tone of this melodrama of murderers, scoundrels and sadistic sex. As Thomas well knows, poets have historically served as a symbol of redemption in Russia. But merely dropping their names will not redeem Ararat for readers who expected more from the author of The White Hotel. -By Patricia Blake
...image, her need for smooth modernity and rationality. Maria's ostensible embarrassment over her heritage is a dirty trick to play. She is too finely tuned to admit this sort of flaw blithely; by nature a vivid personality. She must and does go to great lengths to avoid trite melodrama. The words she utters at the end of the play are too cliched to be the credible product of the Maria whose quick intellect has stunned us in earlier dialogues: "We're serious people. I am much more serious, much more real for having accepted my Gypsy root...